I was just reading the latest LinkShare newsletter for affiliates, and one item caught my eye – the launch of a new WP plugin from them.

The LinkShare RSS DealFeed plug-in makes it easy for WordPress users to promote RSS feeds from advertisers they are partnered with. Users simply download the plug-in, enter their token and choose the Advertiser feed they would like to promote. Publishers will need to be partnered with an advertiser to display that advertiser’s RSS feed content.

That’s cool to see LinkShare getting into the WordPress action, since pretty much any and all of my new sites these days are built on WordPress.

I went for a long time hand coding all of my affiliate sites, but it was just time to move on and make the process more efficient.

I just read the Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing Workbook by Jay Berkowitz, and it was an excellent and informative read.

If you’re not familiar with Jay Berkowitz, he has a podcast that I never miss, he is the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, and a frequent speaker at marketing conferences (he’ll be at the Affiliate Summit Social Media 2008 event on October 5 in NYC).

As the name suggests, the book covers Jay’s ten golden rules of Internet marketing.

It’s a quick read, and I think it would be an asset for any affiliate or affiliate manager. Contents include 11 case studies, some practical exercises and tips, as well as consumer and B2B examples.

ShareASale announced today that affiliates can now create and generate their own video creatives, and link them to multiple different merchants throughout the video through the use of cue points with Make-A-Video.

Make-A-Video was announced earlier this month, but now it’s ready for affiliates to play around with it.

I checked in with Brian Littleton, President and CEO of ShareASale, about the release of Make-A-Video, and here is what he had to say…

“Our goal has always been to put the best tools in the hands of Merchants and Affiliates, enabling them to do what they do best. From an Affiliate perspective, I feel we have done that in this case by allowing them to focus on things like merchandising and content â€“ and not on trying to create a video player or worrying about tracking.

Video content is an area of enormous growth potential as everyone recognizes, and the only hurdle for Merchants and Affiliates alike seemed to be the actual technical trackingâ€¦ so we targeted our efforts there. Once a video is shot, it takes no more than 5-10 minutes to generate a full-featured video creative which they can then use immediately.”

This looks like an exciting feature from ShareASale and I will be testing it out very soon.

Syntryx has developed a specialized search engine that crawls over 20 million sites and indexes some 1.5 million online affiliate and publisher sites across many ad networks, according to Internet Retailer.

The results enable Syntryx to provide data to advertisers about which sites rank high on traffic from particular keywords.

For example, in one study Syntryx used the terms “Christmas, xmas and holiday” in conjunction with popular electronics-related terms “DVD, digital camera, camcorders, HD and computers” and mapped those terms against the publisher and affiliate sites where eBay, online retailer Buy.com and the web arm of multi-channel retailer BestBuy.com place ads. The resulting scatter diagram shows considerable overlap between Buy.com and eBay, but that BestBuy.com is not advertising on at least 350 relevant sites.

This sort of intelligence could be huge for affiliate managers. I wish I had access to this information back when I was managing affiliate programs.

UK affiliate network AffiliateFuture has released a coupon management system for affiliates called AF Voucher Framework.

AF Voucher Framework is a complete site with all the standard features of an affiliate coupon site.

It is ready to go out of the box, but the folks at AffiliateFuture urge affiliates to apply their own unique value proposition.

The code is simple to allow room for customization, and there is an admin panel that enables affiliates to add new coupons (from any network) and also to import their coupons directly from the AffiliateFuture xml service.